Becoming Trader Joe Quotes

“And by the spring of 1971, the caterpillar, Good Time Charley, had emerged from his chrysalis as Whole Earth Harry, a party store/cum health foods store.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Let’s define health foods as foods grown with as few chemicals as possible, processed with as few chemicals as possible, and packaged as “ecologically” as possible. There was a notion that eating health foods, called “inner ecology” (inner to one’s body), would somehow help the “outer ecology” (outer to one’s body) of the biosphere. Some Bailey’s Irish Cream on Your Granola? We prepared to marry the health food store to the liquor store. This concept, obviously, was founded in schizophrenia. But it occurred to me that people who really thought about what they ingested, whether they were wine connoisseurs or health food nuts, were basically on the same radar beam. Both groups were fragmented from the masses who willingly consumed Folgers coffee, Best Foods Mayonnaise, Wonder Bread, Coca-Cola, etc. Both groups were the kind of people who, I was hoping, represented a breakup of mainstream consumption in America.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“As I described in the “Uncorked!” chapter, the economic background in 1970 was turning grim, and sales were weakening. I was concerned. And then, once again, Scientific American came to the rescue. Each September that wonderful magazine devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn’t exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out. I Suffered a Conversion on the Road to Damascus Within weeks, I subscribed to The Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years. Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time. Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try “health foods.” After I’d read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else, except the 100 percent Luddites who wanted to return to some lifestyle approximating the Stone Age. After all, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools,” hardly Luddite.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“We were to wine connoisseurs what that great airline, PSA, was to travelers before the airlines were deregulated in 1981. Like us, PSA’s pricing was based on a close reading of FAA regulations, which in those days set the fare for every air route in the U.S. As long as PSA flew only within California, however, they were free of FAA price regulation. PSA had been one of my heroes, and now I was glad to join it in offering great value to our customers.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“drove a truck through it! Within three years, we were the leading retailer of imported wines in California!”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“This was when we saw Trader Joe’s shift from the fun-providing Good Time Charley into the more health-savvy Whole Earth Harry by 1971.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The ideal location I found for the first Trader Joe’s was a 1911 bottled water plant on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena. My real estate broker—and a de facto member of Trader Joe’s top management—had one hell of a time negotiating the lease with an obdurate lawyer, Patrick James Kirby. Kirby was so tough that later Alice said if she ever got a divorce, she was going to hire Kirby. He liked that.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“It’s a hard policy to sell to most managements. Even to my own management! For years I used to take all new employees to lunch. Among other admonitions, I told them that if they ever got a better offer, they should take it. As soon as they could, my field supervisors ended those lunches. Another frank idea was vetoed by my top people: I wanted to publish their salaries and bonuses, and mine, every year when we issued our annual compensation bulletins.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Most of my career has been spent selling “plans of action and programmes of collaboration,” whether to Rexall to start up Pronto Markets; or Bank of America to buy out Pronto; or landlords; or vendors, many of whom have been very skeptical of, if not outright hostile to, my plans; and above all to my employees. If you want to know what differentiates me from most managers, that’s it. From the beginning, thanks to Ortega y Gasset, I’ve been aware of the need to sell everybody.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The State begins when groups, naturally divided, find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed groups. Before all, the State is a plan of action and a Programme of Collaboration. The men are called upon so that together they may do something. . . . It is pure dynamism, the will to do something in common, and thanks to this the idea of the State, is bounded by no physical limits. . .”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“As we evolved Trader Joe’s, its greatest departure from the norm wasn’t its size or its decor. It was our commitment to product knowledge, something which was totally foreign to the mass-merchant culture, and our turning our backs to branded merchandise.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“As a second way to pump investment into the Pronto stores, to support our high wage costs, we began to add hard liquor, instead of just beer and wine, to the stores. (We did this well before 7-Eleven’s arrival.) The cost of a liquor license in those days was so great that the addition of a liquor license, and its added high-value-per-cubic-inch inventory, doubled our investment in a store without expanding beyond the 2,400 square foot conventional convenience store module.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The problem with a convenience store (a small store with a small inventory and few fixtures) is that it is hard to invest enough money to let the people be productive enough to justify high wages and benefits. I had put the cart—the high wages—before the horse—the convenience market. Perhaps, as the young lady from Stanford commented in 1986, I had done the right thing for the wrong reason. Much of my career was spent trying to find ways to pay the high wages to which I was totally committed. First we upped the investment ante by taking only prime locations, which could generate the most sales, even though the rents were higher.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“The principal purpose of this program was to vent grievances and address them where possible. And I think this program was as important as pay in keeping employees with us. Productivity in part is the product of tenure. That’s why I believe that turnover is the most expensive form of labor expense. I am proud that, during my thirty years at Pronto and Trader Joe’s, we had virtually no turnover of full-time employees, except for the ordinary human problems of too, too solid flesh.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Equally important was our practice of giving every full-time employee an interview every six months. At Stanford I’d been taught that employees never organize because of money: they organize because of un-listened-to grievances. We set up a program under which each employee (including some part-timers) was interviewed, not by the immediate superior, the store manager, but by the manager’s superior.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“[The problem with unions is not their pay scales; it’s their work rules and seniority rules.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Actually, because of fluctuations in the business, employees often alternate between four-day and six-day weeks (38.5 hours to 57.5 hours). This generates a lot of three-day weekends, which is quite popular with the troops.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“But we were still way short when I went to see Tom Deane at Bank of America. I presented my case; and—on the spot (!)—he loaned me the money on our (Alice’s and mine) personal signatures. Years later, I asked him how he had been so ballsy. “It’s simple,” he replied. “Rexall was on Pronto’s leases, and I figured they wouldn’t let you go bankrupt.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“By the time I bought Pronto Markets, it might have taken only a slightly bigger trailer, mostly to accommodate the cribs for the two kids we now had. We did find the money, somehow. Rexall was willing to take back paper. (Dart was in a hurry to wind up his retailing affairs. This was a big advantage for me, because if I walked away, he’d be left with a crumb of a bastard business.) We had $4,000 from Alice’s savings from her teaching school before she had the kids (we lived on my $325) and we sold our little house in which we had an equity of $7,000. I borrowed $2,000 from my grandmother and $5,000 from my father. (Pop, an engineer, spent most of his career being alternately employed and dis-employed by General Dynamics depending on the vagaries of the aerospace business; in between he owned a series of small businesses. I think he even had a Mac Tool route in 1962.)”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Seventeen years later, when I finally sold the company, the cost basis of my total investment was only $25,000.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“For a while I wondered how that association, which lasted almost forty years until his death in 1993, was forged, until I realized it was simple: we were both left-handed. I think that handedness is the most important thing one can know about a person. The question was never on the employment application forms, and it’s probably verboten to ask these days. But dyslexia lurks in the brain of every left-hander, which means, we see the world differently, sometimes profitably. That’s why, when I interview people, I try to get them to write something. At one point I was accused of running a cabal of left-handers at Trader Joe’s. One of them, Doug Rauch, is President of Trader Joe’s on the East Coast as of this writing”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Despite my desperate need for money as Pronto emerged from Rexall in 1962, I’d had a bellyful of under-the-table offers from creameries. “We’ll pay you in cash, if you’ll just meet us anywhere outside the United States—our foreign subsidiaries will fund it, and the IRS will never know.” That was a typical pitch. I was prudent enough to guess, however, that it would expose me to blackmail should I ever try to switch brands.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“In 1935, in the pit of the Depression, when milk was being sold below cost, Merritt’s father had helped write the “milk control” laws, which partly govern California’s milk business (they have since been updated several times), especially the relations between the milk companies and grocery stores. After World War II, these laws increasingly were honored in the breach, as the big creameries and the big supermarket chains cut deals for illegal rebates or illegal financing or both. This is the normal result of quasi-fascist laws that try to regulate the marketplace. But in 1935, Benito Mussolini’s concept of binding state and industry together (the fasces is a Roman symbol, an ax with a bundle of sticks tied around its handle; the sticks represent the industries and the church, the ax represents the state, a one-for-all-and-all-for-one construct) was so popular around the world that Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to copy it with the Blue Eagle National Recovery Administration, until the Supreme Court threw it out in 1937. Relics of Mussolini, however, linger in all the states of the union, sometimes in milk control laws (and always in alcoholic beverage laws).”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“But I hope you’ll consider the following, my favorite quote from my favorite book on management, The Winning Performance by Clifford and Cavanaugh: The fourth [general theme in winning corporations] is a view of profit and wealth-creation as inevitable by-products of doing other things well. Money is a useful yardstick for measuring quantitative performance and profit and an obligation to investors. But . . . making money as an end in itself ranks low. In 1994 Stanford Business School published a study of winning companies (companies that have endured for a hundred years) called “Built to Last,” which came to pretty much the same conclusion.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Whether the mild paranoia generated by a name that few people can pronounce was a factor in my shaping Trader Joe’s, I leave to your judgment. Whether the substantial paranoia generated by being a left-hander in a right-handed world was a factor in putting a left-handed spin on Trader Joe’s, however, is beyond dispute. For some competitors, Trader Joe’s has been sinister in at least two meanings of the word.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“People often ask me, how many stores did we have at such-and-such a time? It’s the wrong question to ask. What’s important is dollar sales. For example, from 1980 to 1988, we increased the number of stores by 50 percent, but sales were up 340 percent.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“Look at any supermarket ad. You’ll learn precious little about the provenance of any product in it; you’ll see only name, size, and price.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“I believe in the wisdom that you gain customers one by one, but you lose them in droves.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys

“No bulky products like paper towels or sugar, because the high-value-per-cubic-inch rule still prevailed.”
― Joe Coulombe, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys